COLUMN ONE : Launching Supersonic Dreams : NASA hopes to lead U.S. bid to build a better, faster airliner. Despite skeptics’ warnings, all major commercial contractors are expected to join the effort to outdo the Concorde.

A sleek, needle-nosed jetliner carrying 300 passengers taxis out of Los Angeles International Airport, rolls to a hushed takeoff over Playa del Rey then accelerates above the Pacific Ocean like no commercial plane in history--reaching 2.4 times the speed of sound nearly 12 miles above the earth.

The titanium airplane with a cockpit that looks like a video arcade pulls into Tokyo in just over four hours--cutting six hours off the normal trip. Getting to Asia from L.A. is no more of a hassle than a hop to Chicago.

Jet-lagged international travelers have been anticipating such an airplane for 20 years, since Congress halted development of a first-generation supersonic jetliner and Europe produced the rival Concorde--an economic flop.

Advances in technology have raised hopes in the Clinton Administration that the longstanding economic and environmental problems with supersonic jets can be overcome--if the government puts in the seed money.

Without much fanfare given the stakes, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is poised to issue a $1.5-billion contract in the coming weeks to a consortium of every major U.S. commercial airplane and jet engine company for an ambitious research program leading to a supersonic jet in regular service by 2005.

NASA hopes Americans would dominate the effort, though it would likely include foreign suppliers and investors. It’s the sort of colossal industrial project that would require enormous investments, carry huge technical risks and raise potentially serious environmental concerns.

Some experts claim NASA is too optimistic about its ability to solve the environmental concerns. And the airlines, reeling from traumatic financial losses, have voiced little enthusiasm for buying new planes, particularly ones a decade away.

But there is a huge potential payoff if the skeptics are wrong and the plane fulfills its promise of being far more fuel-efficient than the Concorde and if it can fly without fouling the atmosphere.

Indeed, NASA touts the program as the most important industrial project in the nation’s future and says it is a key to halting the erosion of American dominance of the world aircraft industry.

At stake is a potential $200 billion in orders for 500 to 1,000 of the supersonic aircraft that would support roughly 140,000 manufacturing jobs in such areas as Southern California and Seattle, said Wesley Harris, NASA’s aeronautics chief.

“We have growing confidence that this plane will be built by 2005 by either the U.S. or the Europeans,” he said. “Who will build it? U.S. companies must be in the driver’s seat.”

The strong advocacy reflects a changed attitude at NASA, which for decades has sponsored aircraft research that often helped foreign competitors as much as Americans and often engaged in academic research with little commercial value.

Since the Apollo moon missions, NASA’s commitment to aeronautics has withered. Director Daniel S. Goldin now wants to put more emphasis on helping the U.S. aircraft industry, drawing strong support from Congress. Last year, lawmakers gave the supersonic program $10 million more than the $187 million requested by NASA.

“We have underfunded aviation research and we need to make substantial investments in this area,” said Rep. George Brown (D-Colton), chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. “This program is a good thing for the nation to do.”

Under the new supersonic program, known as the High Speed Civil Transport, NASA will play a central role in organizing the efforts of major U.S. aerospace firms and making the key decisions in the next four years about which technologies will be used.

For the first time, the archrivals of the commercial aircraft industry will be partners under NASA’s direction: Boeing and McDonnell Douglas for the jet’s airframe and General Electric and Pratt & Whitney for the engines.

By pooling America’s best talents, NASA hopes to make the major breakthroughs needed to make a supersonic jetliner economically viable.

That task alone is daunting.

The program to develop the aircraft, including the detailed engineering of millions of parts and the building of thousands of production tools, would require a private-sector investment of $15 billion--more than double the cost of past jetliner developments.

Even if high sales volume defrayed the investment expense, the planes would cost $180 million to $300 million each. (A Boeing 747 today costs roughly $150 million.)

Proponents argue that the high price would be offset by the aircraft’s ability to make two trips for every one that a subsonic plane makes. As a result, fares would be no more than 20% higher than current tickets, Boeing and McDonnell Douglas engineers say.

“It would make this an airplane for everybody, not just high-paying passengers,” said Bruce Bunin, McDonnell’s manager for the program in Long Beach.

Keeping costs low will also require that the plane be highly fuel-efficient, meaning its structure must be very lightweight, engines must be highly economical and aerodynamic drag must be at a minimum.

Because U.S. law prohibits commercial planes creating sonic booms over land, the jets would fly supersonically only above the ocean. A failing of the 100-passenger Concorde has been its gross inefficiency in flying subsonically, an area where the new plane must excel. After Congress forbid supersonic flights over land in the 1970s, the market for Concordes collapsed; fewer than 30 were built.

Unlike the Concorde, the new jet would have flaps and slats that would change the shape of the wing depending on the plane’s speed, allowing it to fly nearly as efficiently as today’s jetliners.

But even if the plane can do all this, it is not clear that airlines will rush to buy it.

U.S. airlines have collectively lost $12 billion in four years, and their enthusiasm for costly new planes seems tepid at best. American Airlines spokesman Al Becker said the supersonic jet carries high risk and may be too specialized for the flexible fleet his company wants.

“This is an industry that is struggling desperately for survival,” he said. “We are in no position to be thinking about buying large numbers of $200-million airplanes. Where are we going to raise that kind of money?”

Instead of a supersonic jet, airlines may opt for a proposed 600-passenger super-jumbo plane that Boeing and McDonnell Douglas are studying. It would involve much less technical risk and may be more adaptable to different routes.

The Air Transport Assn., the trade group representing U.S. airlines, has not considered the supersonic jet as a priority, a spokesman said. And the program is not even mentioned in McDonnell’s or Boeing’s 1993 shareholder reports.

NASA officials, however, believe any reservations about the supersonic planes are myopic.

Just build the plane and “the market will be there,” claims Louis J. Williams, director of the supersonic program at NASA. Commercial air travel is growing at 8% to 10% per year, he said, and international travel growth is paralleling the explosion in international trade.

Weary business travelers would flock to a supersonic plane that promises to reduce jet lag. If executives can get to Tokyo or Paris, conduct business and board a return flight on the same day, they may never have to adjust to a different time zone.

“From the traveling public’s perception, I am not sure we have done much for them in the past 20 years,” said Sam Gilkey, head of GE’s effort to develop a supersonic engine. “This plane offers more to the public than a 600-seat plane you hear so much about.”

Still, even in an industry where firms bet their survival on each new product, the supersonic plane carries unique risks.

It will require entirely new high-technology materials, computerized jet engine controls and even new research into human behavior. For example, when pilots land the jet, instead of looking out the window, they would rely on “synthetic vision” that would resemble a video game screen.

It would be the first time that pilots could not directly see the runway, because the cockpit in a supersonic jet is angled up so sharply. In the Concorde, the cockpit is mounted on hinges and tilts down at landing to allow the pilots to see, but the design imposes a big weight and drag penalty.

The technical hurdles are so great that “we don’t know yet whether there is a viable commercial program out there,” Boeing program manager Mike Henderson admits. “It is a research program right now.”

Nonetheless, the prospects appear better than in 1971, when in a titanic political battle Congress voted to kill the supersonic program, overriding the unusual alliance of President Richard Nixon, labor boss George Meany and the aerospace industry.

The decision was based largely on environmental concerns--the same issue that haunts today’s effort.

NASA and industry officials believe they have licked a longstanding concern that a fleet of supersonic commercial jets flying through the stratosphere would seriously degrade the ozone.

In recent years, NASA has invested $500 million into research on supersonic jet engines that would cut pollution by controlling combustion and fuel air mixture. NASA’s aims to reduce nitrogen oxide emissions eightfold, compared to existing engines, which emit five grams of nitrogen oxide for each kilogram of fuel burned.

A NASA-funded study has estimated that the supersonic fleet would cause the loss of 1% of the ozone layer, a level that NASA officials believe will be politically acceptable. But some environmentalists differ sharply.

Michael Oppenheimer, an atmospheric physicist with the Environmental Defense Fund and a participant in the NASA studies, suggests the study was far too uncertain to accurately predict a 1% loss. He added, however, that even a 1% erosion is too much given damage already done to the ozone.

Because about 5% of the ozone over North America has already been lost to pollution, another 1% would allow even higher concentrations of ultraviolet radiation, raising skin cancer rates, he said.

“Is Joe Six Pack going to be willing to suffer an increased dose of ultraviolet radiation so some jet-setters can fly to Japan quicker?” he asked. “I am skeptical.”

But a recent independent report by the National Research Council generally praised NASA’s efforts to address environmental concerns. Thomas E. Graedel, the study’s chairman and a Bell Labs scientist, told Congress in February that he could see no environmental issues that would preclude the operation of a supersonic jet.

Two other environmental issues also loom large.

A fleet of jets--traveling at Mach 2.4, or about 1,600 m.p.h.--would cause sonic booms over thousands of square miles of ocean each day, subjecting marine life to “repetitive sonic trauma,” a scientist on the House Space, Science and Technology Committee noted. The impact is unknown, though NASA experts consider it relatively minor.

Another concern is the potential for the jets to change weather patterns, according to the National Research Council report. The fleet could affect water vapor and cloud formations, it suggested.

(Military jets routinely fly supersonically, but they limit their booms to military air spaces and they can fly supersonically only briefly at altitudes lower than the proposed commercial plane, thus limiting environmental impact.)

Oppenheimer said the program will make economic sense only when the environmental issues are resolved. He compares the proposed jets to nuclear power plants, in which the government encouraged electric utilities to spend billions on a technology the public ultimately rejected on environmental grounds.

But aviation has always had unique public support. It occupies a special place in American history and plays a key role in the U.S. economy. Commercial aircraft are America’s leading export.

A decade ago, American aircraft makers held 90% of the world market for large jetliners, according to Harris of NASA; today it’s 70%.

Despite the threat of foreign competition, a U.S. program is almost certain to have suppliers and investors in Europe and Japan--much like the newly introduced Boeing 777 jetliner. Neither Boeing nor McDonnell have the financial capability alone for a $15-billion development program.

Boeing and McDonnell are part of an international group studying the economics and marketing of a supersonic jet. While U.S. technology looks superior, the 20 years of Concorde have given Europeans important insights.

At issue is whether the NASA research program will give the United States the dominant technological position internationally. With the lead role, U.S. industry would then be in a position to decide when to launch production of the jet.

“I believe it is the most critical manufacturing decision this country will make in the next 10 years,” Harris said.

New Technologies Required for Building Supersonic Jet

The new supersonic jetliner sponsored by a $1.5-billion NASA research contract would require major breakthroughs in aircraft technology.

Among them:

* Aerodynamic drag must be cut to an absolute minimum. One technique involves a radical new design in which massive pumps would suck turbulent air off the skin of the wings through millions of microscopic holes. The so-called laminar flow over the wings would be virtually free of turbulence, cutting the drag.

* The 311-foot-long jet must be so light that its structure would probably be built in large part with thin sheets of titanium, held together through an exotic process called super plastic diffusion bonding.

* Engines that power supersonic jets are notoriously noisy, but the new planes would have to keep quiet if they want a chance at wide acceptance. A new design for the exhaust nozzles is expected to allow the plane to meet existing airport noise standards.

* Inside the engines, the combustion chamber, or “combustors,” would operate at 3,600 degrees, hot enough to melt existing steel alloys and about 700 degrees hotter than existing engines. NASA is betting that a new fiber-reinforced ceramic composite liner would stand up to the heat.

* To prevent severe environmental damage, the engines must emit no more than five grams of nitrogen oxide for each kilogram of fuel burned. One proposed system would mix fuel and air in the engine upstream from the normal burning zone, allowing the lean fuel mix to vaporize better. The other proposed system would create a stratified fuel mixture, first injecting excess fuel and then adding air later in the combustion to create a lean stage--a concept called rich burn-quick quench-lean burn.

* NASA is still hoping to find ways to reduce the sonic boom generated by the jet as it flies over the ocean. A boom, which is the acoustic shock wave trailing an aircraft, is a function of an aircraft’s mass, shape and its speed. Although cutting the boom is possible, it must be done without significantly hampering flight efficiency.